Non-Destructive Evaluation scanners (“NDE scanners”) are commonly used for inspecting Equipment Under Test (“EUT”) such as fuel tanks and chemical storage tanks in field industrial applications. NDE scanners typically have sensor probes which include ultrasonic transducers, electromagnetic transducers, or optical transducers, which emit measurement signals and receive return signals in response thereto. The emitted measurement signals are affected by the material of the EUT being inspected to provide the return signals which are representative of the physical conditions of the EUT.
Probes are typically mounted in floating platforms which will remain in fixed orientation relative to a surface of an EUT. When an NDE scanner is moving across the surface of an EUT along two axes of a plane, defined as the X-Y axes, it is desirable to constrain the NDE scanner probe to follow the surface and remain in contact with the surface such that a central axis of the probe will remain transverse or perpendicular to the surface. To accomplish this the NDE scanner probe is usually mounted to a shoe, generally similar to a skid plate, which will slide along the surface of an EUT. The NDE scanner probe shoe usually has forward edges and trailing edges which are arcuately shaped edges to allow the shoe to lift as obstructions are encountered. Various mechanisms and mechanical linkages have been used to allow a shoe to lift along a Z-axis as the probe moves along one or more of the X-Y axes. Several such mechanism are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 10,072,745, issued Sep. 11, 2018, having application Ser. No. 15/333,181, filed Oct. 24, 2016, and invented by Harvey Alan Dorsey, which is hereby incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein
It is also desirable that an NDE scanner be deployed by means of aerial drones. However, aerial drones do not provide sufficiently stable platforms during flight for use with the various types of sensor probes noted above for NDE scanners. Aerial drones are able to reach locations relative to EUTs which are difficult for a person to access manually.